The Ghost Keeper

  As for me, I will wait. I know there are those who say I should be shot in the street; perhaps this will happen, but perhaps not. Someone (one of these occupiers, it doesn’t matter who) said within my hearing that I had better kill myself. It is funny he says this, for the idea has so often come into my mind, but here I am. I am sure the same could be said for many other people. But I will tell you, don’t worry over me (though you might pray for me): I am content in thinking that you, and Anna, and Tobias, and Lena were able to get out, and that I might see you again before long.

  Please send word regarding your plans, and send any news at all. It would be good to hear about something outside this country.

  With the utmost respect and brotherly feeling,

  Friedrich Zimmel

  Josef reads this letter over and over. He lets Schwartz read it when his friends have left, and Schwartz takes his glasses off upon finishing it—says, “Well!” and seems to sum up Josef’s feelings, confused as they are. Schwartz asks him, after a long pause, “Is it possible he doesn’t know about what was happening in Germany and Poland?”

  Josef says, “It was likely happening in Austria too.” And then he says, “And no, it isn’t possible, I don’t think.”

  “And no word . . . no word of your sister, then, or your parents.”

  Josef swallows. “It would seem not.”

  Schwartz takes up the letter again and sets his glasses back on his nose. “He seems fairly certain you’ll return, this Mr. Zimmel.”

  “Yes.” Josef can’t find his voice. He wonders, How much of this news has reached Shanghai? Any of it?—and sees his wife and child alive, brave, resisting, awaiting the end of war. And then in the same moment sees them dead, buried, bombed and burned to nothing.

  “There, there,” says Schwartz, and he pats Josef on the shoulder while this man folds forward over the table, his face in his hands.

  7

  LOW CLOUDS, SUMMER 1945, IN THE PORT CITY OF Shanghai—my mind paints the city and a figure of a woman. She walks through the restricted sector, a place I’ve never seen. The sidewalk is uneven, and to either side of her huddle two- and three-storey buildings, one-room apartments. What the air smells like in that neighborhood—I have to imagine it: garbage and raw sewage, but also hot oil, like our home, and salt water.

  The woman I carry in this vision is small—petite under the richest of circumstances but here also whittled down by poverty. She wears a European style of ladies’ hat; she carries a worn leather bag in both hands. Her shoes are down at the heel, but she steps across the pavement with purpose.

  Twice that morning the air-raid sirens have blown, but there were no bombs; now the day is hot, and the streets clang only with voices, footsteps and carts.

  Every window of every building is blacked over inside: shallow glass set like false eyes on this narrow street. Now and then comes a Japanese guard strolling by on foot patrol, gun or club at his hip; more often, through the heat, comes a Shanghainese woman or man, striding quickly, perhaps weighed down with a sack slung over their back. These latter meet the gaze of the woman on the sidewalk with a look rather like that of the blacked-over windows, and she returns this gaze in kind. There’s no animosity among them, I imagine. Each is only busy surviving.

  The clouds hang so low in this summer heat that they won’t see the planes, and the pilots won’t see them. The people on the streets will hear later, if they live, that the bombing raid was aimed at a radio tower. Meanwhile the whistle of bombs comes at first almost thoughtful and unthreatening, like a memory one can’t quite place.

  The world cracks. The woman on the sidewalk has time only to throw herself down against the wall of a building. Explosions not as sound but as a punch in the head, and then only ringing as of a strange dream.

  —BUT SEE, I can’t know whether this woman in my mind is Anna, nor if she survives. Some woman is caught in an Allied bombing in Shanghai. Some woman dies. See your heart, Tobak, and the twist in its love—for you’d praise the Lord in knowing your wife lived, even if it meant another woman were dead in her place.

  ON AUGUST 6, when the bomb falls on Hiroshima, I am walking in the field near the cemetery and praying. Here the summer has roasted the earth brown; just these few patches of thirsty grass are left. In Vienna, in the Währing cemetery, there was this same unevenness in the soil, and the sense of fingers reaching up to push back. And it didn’t frighten me. I wanted only to reach down in comfort. To say, No, I have not forgotten you. Yes, you still are. I don’t know what or who you are, but you are, still.

  In this air: the smell of flush green leaves and brown hot earth. The sun presses down on me at an evening angle from the west. And the question comes into me, as if through the light—the question of what lonesomeness becomes, and where we go, if this living person walking on uneven ground and reaching down in love forgets, or stops caring, or is gone.

  As I walk home, a part of me holds the question and turns it over and over like a smooth stone. But another part begins already to turn the Währing dead—these strange faces who have followed me since I was a youth—into an old mother and father, and a sister, and Anna, and a little boy, seven years old. I imagine them on the opposite pole of the earth, their weight pressing down, and the earth beneath my feet rising just a little in response. I will reach down, I think, through everything, to them.

  And here, so far from any of that, I can believe for a moment that the net sum of it all might be hope. Consider Lena Kostner, my cousin whom Friedrich protected. So she lived! And so, I can tell my younger self, you did right, you helped to save her—you made her mother trust him. Through grief for Sarah Kostner I can be thankful for Lena. These are little victories, true, but they don’t come undone.

  It’s a warm-drunk swell of hope in my heart, outgrowing the hollow of grief to say: Isn’t it possible that the world will not go on killing itself forever? Isn’t it possible that having seen the worst of hatred and evil, we will cover our mouths, we will cover our heads in ashes, and we will turn back towards something better? The sun is almost gone, the sky is purple, and the trees reach up to God—and I have forgotten who I am; I could be someone happy.

  When I stamp the dust from my feet into the mat at the Schwartzes’ front door, I hear Edith say: “There is Josef at the door; now be sensitive.” They’re a gaggle of grown-ups with peering, half-ashamed child faces, clumped in a U around the radio.

  This man I was then does not know what an atomic bomb might be, but he recognizes the shock that threatens to make an empire surrender. He will never remember the exact words he hears over the radio this evening, just the sudden quiet understanding that arrives in him. He goes to the back doors of the house, looks out at the garden in the dark. Behind him, an electric voice crackles away in English; somewhere on the next block, there are men and women shouting in the streets that the world is not what it was half an hour ago.

  8

  Anna, Tobias, loves:

  May this letter find you—may it find you alive and well! My Lord, everything in me prays it. I am here in New York still. I will do whatever I can to help you and join you. Won’t you write and tell me what you need? I will do everything in my power. I will do anything.

  And to the city that raised him and spat him out, he also can write:

  How strange, how good, to hear from you at last, dear Friedrich. I thank God that you are alive, and that you remember us. And you protected little Lena! You give me hope; if only everyone had done as you did. Perhaps there were others like you. I pray there were.

  Please, if you can, let me know where I can reach Lena Kostner. I would like to write to her. I wonder if she has any other family at all, if her mother really is gone.

  I have to ask you: do you know what has become of our family and friends? Have you heard from Zilla, or my parents, or Anna’s mother or brothers? Do you know how many people from Vienna were taken to these horrific Nazi camps? Friedrich, I know it must pain you to think about it, but I beg
you, as a dear friend: please tell me everything you know. I am trying to get in touch with everyone, but I don’t know how long that will take.

  My friend, is it possible we have all come out on the other side of this ordeal? Have we survived? I pray it might be true—it seems impossible that it could be over at last. I know it’s too much to hope that everyone I love is all right, but the thought of seeing any of you again is so beautiful.

  He writes also to Paris, but there comes no word. And in time, as autumn sets in, a new letter comes from Vienna:

  Dear Josef,

  Your letter arrived just this morning. You console and you disturb me. I am so glad you are alive, and that you still love me. All the rest is agony, Josef! I wish you didn’t admire me: please, hate me rather than say you admire me.

  You don’t know what you ask when you ask me about your family. It’s so hard to know yet what happened to anyone. Perhaps things will become clear in the next few months. Zilla wrote to me maybe once after France surrendered. It is conceivable that she and your parents are still alive, but I confess that for a long time I have mourned them all as dead. No—I have to correct that: perhaps it has not yet really been mourning—I did not want to face the fullness of that feeling. Even now I don’t think I can. But it is very, very hard to hope that anyone escaped. Please forgive me for writing this, Josef, but I don’t want to mislead you. Still, it’s possible they were among the few who survived.

  I’m grateful that these occupiers judge me mercifully: they believe I joined the Party under duress—I hope you would agree that this is true. They are happy that I didn’t give Lena up to the police, and that I helped you. And a lot of neighbours whom I never heard of before have started to say that they supported me because they knew I wasn’t really a brute at heart. Could this be true? I have trouble believing anything good, Josef. I wish you were here, despite everything.

  Regarding Lena: I’ll see about putting you in touch with her, but I don’t know that she’ll be receptive. I don’t think she likes to remember her old life. I believe it hurts her.

  I will wait for your next letter. I will try to contact people and get more news for you. These things, I think, will be enough to guard me from the worst kind of thoughts.

  An envelope arrives back from Paris, and it is marked only: Return to sender: Not at this address.

  Dear Ella,

  he writes to Anna’s mother (for what is there to do but write).

  Please write back immediately if this reaches you, and let me know if you need help, or money, or anything. I wish I could write with news of your daughter and grandson, but I haven’t heard from Anna yet; still, please don’t be afraid—the mail is slow, and China is such a long way away.

  It would be so good to hear from you. It would be so good to know you are all right. I pray that you are, and that Chaim and Jakob also are safe. I miss you all terribly.

  To an embassy in Paris, and to friends he fears may not remember him. He writes until his fingers seize and the wall behind his eyes rises dark.

  IT’S A WEDNESDAY, early in the autumn, raining, when he gets home to Edith Schwartz waiting at the door: this look of strained exhilaration on her face, or is it fear? She is holding the mail in her hands. She says, “Josef, it’s for you,” in such reverent tones that his mind seems to hear the words echo off stone walls. He holds out his hands, and he receives the two envelopes, says, “Thank you, Edith.”

  He moves into the living room, and he sits down on the low sofa, before he lets himself look at the return addresses. And see, both of these letters, from China:

  Josef! Dear Josef—

  I’m writing this in a hurry to let you know we’re alive, we’re together, we’re all right. I cried when I saw your letter, and Tobias said, “He’s dead!” He didn’t understand when I told him you were alive and you’d written to us; he said I should laugh. So we laughed, and we danced a little. Now I’m writing this in a great hurry so I can get it into the mail today. Tobias will mail it for me.

  A better letter is on its way, don’t worry. But I hope this will put your mind a little at ease. I know we will be dancing for the next month at least.

  With all my love,

  Anna

  PS: Tobias adds the following:

  Dear Vati,

  We read your letter today and I was very happy. Please send another one soon. How is America? Please draw for me another picture of a cat. I love you.

  Tobias

  Dear Josef,

  Now that I have sent our first message off in such a rush, let me take a bit of time to let you know how we are. Your letter finally reached us at our second apartment in Shanghai: we’ve made do here these past few years; it’s small and rough, but by now it feels very much like home.

  The Japanese soldiers were awful when they were here. I don’t want to write about that today; I will tell you about it someday, when we’re together, when I feel very safe and far from all this. (Don’t worry, though: the two of us weren’t attacked, specifically.) Also, there was bombing; but again, we were all right. It’s a very crowded and poor little ghetto they’ve crowded us into these last few years, but overall I think the Shanghainese had it worse than we did, and it makes me very sad to think of it.

  There are American soldiers everywhere, and they’re very friendly and happy, for the most part; it’s like they’re on holiday, now that the war is over. Tobias and some of his friends like to follow them around.

  How should I describe how things have been? I suppose we’ve been very poor, I suppose things have been hard—but then again, as I said, there are so many Chinese families who were poorer than us, and after all, we survived. There were long periods of time when I’d be so tense with fear of not having enough for Tobias and me, but then after a few weeks I’d realize we’d had a little to eat every day, and Tobias didn’t really know the difference, and it was like coming up for air after a long time under water.

  Tobias often surprises me. He knows much more Shanghainese than I do (I know practically nothing, admittedly); he talks with some of the street vendors, which made me very nervous at first. Most of the other European children stick with their own kind. Not that Tobias hasn’t made friends at school—actually, I think he is fairly well liked. Then again, at home he has a very cruel mother, so perhaps he’s been careful to find allies out in the world.

  My darling, I don’t want to frighten you, but I must admit that your little boy has seen some very hard things. It is not unheard of for people who die in the street to be left out for a little while, if no one comes to get them, so more than once he’s come across these bodies. Perhaps this has happened more times than I know. And as I said, the Japanese soldiers were sometimes very cruel to the locals—I don’t know exactly how much he witnessed of this, or how much he remembers. (People have been beaten to death, I know, and horrible things done to women.) I hope he’s been spared seeing it, but he wouldn’t tell me, I don’t think: he’s very protective, and he doesn’t like to upset me with bad stories. Perhaps someday he will understand that leaving it to my imagination is much worse.

  I will write again very soon. My Josef, I miss you, and I love you, and I want to assure you that as lonely as I’ve sometimes been, there’s never been another man to take your place in my heart. I will live now for the day when I’ll see you again. I owe you about seven years’ worth of tenderness, and I mean to repay it in full.

  I’ll let Tobias sign off at the bottom of the page again. We are both so happy you’re well. All our love to your friends in New York, and especially to you, Mr. Tobak.

  Love from your Anna

  PS: Dear Vati,

  I found a brown dog today. I wanted to take him home but there is not enough space. My friend Fayvel tried to chase the dog with a stick but I made him stop. Then the dog barked very loud and a man came out of his staircase and said GO AWAY and we laughed. It was very funny. I am happy you are alive and my teacher gave me a new pencil. Please send drawings but I am s
orry if it was rude for me to ask for them so soon. When will I meet you? I love you.

  Tobias Tobak

  Already these pages are softening under his fingerprints and the tears he can’t keep from falling on them. The sudden spasms of laughter that bubble out of him like shaken champagne make Edith Schwartz peer in on him, wringing her hands. He can’t make the words, “It’s all right!” but the look on his face, his tears and his beatitude, make her cry out and embrace him.

  “See, there is still happiness in the world,” she says, wiping her eyes, and Josef kisses her cheek.

  The whole evening he spends filling pages and pages with drawings of cats.

  9

  LATE DECEMBER: HERSCHEL SCHWARTZ AND I SIT BY the window at a deli in the city. Under Schwartz’s nose his moustache twitches, just a little, and a bead of coffee above his lip catches the light like amber. He speaks to me in German, quietly.

  “I think I can understand this need to go back,” he says.

  “It’s foolish. But I won’t have any peace until I do.”

  Taxis slip and honk through the slush outside. A young man at a table near us tells the girl across from him, “She’s got nothing on you, Bets, she’s all gristle,” and the girl says, with strange tenderness, “Well, she’s got nice teeth.”

  Schwartz takes a napkin and dabs his moustache. He says, “It’s a brave choice. It’s the choice of love.”

  “I hardly feel I have a choice.”

  “Ah, but I mean—” He swirls the air with his left hand, looking for the words. “One could simply accept the worst, in the silence. Or one could hope for the best, but resist responsibility. And in between . . .” Now he shrugs as he looks at me. “There, I think, is the hardest choice, perhaps.”